Meanwhile the enemy is low budget suicidal terrorists that this or the TSA can't stop.

I need to research it better, but it's a compelling argument if it holds.

People are going to spend more on video games:

http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/07/with-online-sales-growing-...

Look at the luxury goods market. It's huge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_good

If you want to go to Mars, there's plenty of money in the US economy where GDP is about 15 trillion a year.

Crowdsource an X-Prize...

it's also worth noting that 10 or so years of the Apollo program costed < $150b in modern terms, and did a lot of good for science, created jobs, and industries.

A few planes don't do much good. It would be cheaper to take that money and carpetbomb your enemy. ww2 costed ~4 trillion to the US in modern terms. A trillion dollar pricetag on any plane that doesn't travel through time is pretty ridiculous.

The only engineering Lockheed is doing is financial engineering.

And the right way to do that, is by painting a bright "thou shalt not cross" line in the sand, and then enforcing it (if necessary) with overwhelming airborne superiority.

As opposed to a massive ground invasion and occupation, which has clearly been shown to be self-sacrificial and counterproductive.

-----

To respond in one place to the most common responses I'm getting:

It's fairly obvious in day-to-day life that and military history that (1) you don't appease or tolerate bullies; (2) you don't try to "reason" with the enemy. What I'm saying is a straightforward application of this, and what you're all saying is a straightforward denial of it.

The way to fight terrorism is to provide an environment where people not want to be terrorists. Terrorism requires no state sponsored infrastructure. Bombing places to hell doesn't stop the spread of hopelessness, of desperation, of taking comfort in extremism.

Note: Using the "anti-establishment guerrilla fighters" definition of terrorism, not "causing terror". That's a whole other bag of bagels.

In Palestine, most of the terrorists (but maybe not the leaders) are alturists. Israel has captured quite a few, and profiled them - http://utexas.academia.edu/AmiPedahzur/Papers/209890/Altruis.... The same may have been true of the IRA, and it may be true of the Tamil Tigers. People only blow themselves up when they believe they are fighting against evil oppressors. In these cases, you are right - you need to address the root cause.

In the case of 911, the terrorists themselves may have been altruistic, but they were given support by Afghanistan (and maybe a few Saudis, but we need their oil). Knocking out states which support terrorism (which the US can do quite easily) may be an effective way to stop state-sponsored terrorism.

In any case, it's partly the result of peer pressure. If everyone in a community sees terrorism as a good thing, a few people in that community will become terrorists. Threatening states forces them to fight this attitude. In other cases, there is no state to threaten.

That's a strategy of altruism and failure.

Not "reasoning" with the enemy is absurd--that's how eventually you conclude a conflict. How many wars have ended with the complete annihilation of one side? How many of those victors are regarded with anything other than disgust or shame nowadays?

There is a very concrete point past which the cost of preventing an attack exceeds the damage inflicted by an attack. "Bullies" or "enemies" or whatever you want to call them can trivially exploit this for a civilization that cannot run numbers and face facts.

I believe that I showed in another thread that the TSA alone has wasted human-life-equivalent years equivalent to the 9/11 attacks.

On the schoolyard, in the pub, yes, you should stand up to bullies. But at a national level? As a civilization? You can't reason in the same way.

Nazi Germany? Japan? There was only one way to deal with them; we did it; the world greatly respected us for it; and it's a success story. (This is not to downplay the role other, allied countries also played in these conflicts.)

I believe that I showed in another thread that the TSA alone has wasted human-life-equivalent years equivalent to the 9/11 attacks.

Right - I completely agree - I'm advocating the alternative.

(More modern: Please check the resource curse on wikipedia, or something. You can't reason with dictators which keep their population down so they can steal oil money.)

Edit: Hrm, Wikipedia says it is "for", not "in". Updated.

The way to fight terrorism is to act kindly and justly, and to promote the racial welfare to the extent that everyone is happy and well fed enough that they don't go starting trouble. Also, you get productive enough that the occasional bouts of crazies can be ignored in the long-run--a suicide bomber can only kill once.

Conversely, the way to fight a state such as you propose is to conduct the cheapest attacks possible while causing your enemy to expend lots of resources to fight an ill-defined threat, and to make public statements that are easy to flaunt and vilify.

EDIT: by racial welfare I mean human race, not Caucasian or whatever damn fool distinctions little minds want to draw.

Do you have any evidence for this? The typical suicide bomber is middle class.

There will always be relatively isolated wackos who want to cause damage to you, for real or perceived injustice. As long as you are not provoking a movement against you, it would seem that those can be considered random events which don't need to shape policy.

And we undercut our ability to even attempt such things when we overthrow people's governments and occupy them for a decade, bring war-with-American-flags to their literal doorstep day in and day out.

What else do you want to do? Lay down and die? Build more sewers and help them elect mullahs? Expand the TSA?

Anyway, you'd be surprised at the degree to which others will actually respect you for standing up to bullying, and winning; and the degree to which appeasement actually fuels more bullying (i.e., terrorism). In practice, what would happen is the opposite of what you think. (But if not, stand up to 'em.)

Have you ever considered that many of these groups develop as a response to our own neocolonial actions in their backyard?

That said, I very strongly oppose occupying foreign countries, the TSA, sacrificing our troops, providing foreign aid to nations that operate concentration camps (NoKo), etc. If I want to oppose these things effectively, I have to propose an alternative. I am.

By the way, I think the term "neocolonial" is stupid. I don't know precisely what you mean by it, but I'm assuming you mean roughly the preceeding paragraph, and I'm stating that my solution should not be considered a part of the imaginary "neocolonial" set of actions, but I don't know if you'll agree with that.

The actual method is simple: You won't get stung if you don't poke the hornet nest.

How many poor teenagers do you think would join terrorists if they had better options and understood more about the world than the limited view they are purposely given?

Why do you think the first thing they do is destroy schools and ban women from attending them?

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/22-raptors-suffer-apparent-oxy...

"Though they acknowledged the oxygen failure, Air Force investigators said the crash was Haney's fault for being too distracted by not being able to breathe and failing to either reduce altitude and take off his oxygen mask or to activate the emergency backup oxygen system."

Obviously the software bug should still be fixed, and probably pilot training needs to be updated.

While budget overruns are painful, the idea behind standardizing our fighter jets between the forces, thereby reducing costs is a wise move.

I always thought of the F-22 as a hand-built race car, while these F-35 are Porsche's that can be mass produced, are just as "fast" and will be more reliable due to the standardization.

Also deploying cheap drones are only possible when you dominate the skies with these expensive, complex, man-powered jets.

Well, drones don't have to be cheap, and could hypothetically be just as capable as fighters in most respects (and much more capable in some respects).

Stinger's cost ~38k and are not guaranteed to work so multiply that by the probability of failure.

You can buy drone control system can cost below 1,500$ ex: http://www.micropilot.com/products-mp1028g.htm, granted there are good reasons to buy / build something far more expensive but we are looking at low cost baseline. After that it's a question of range and payload for 10,000$ you can get an RC jet that can do 200 mph and carry a camcorder for surveillance. Call it 15k for a fairly respectable surveillance aircraft. As to being able to fight back just add a spike.

PS: Now figure out what you can do with say 10 billion$ aka 600,000 of these things. Worse yet that's just an opening, they are cheap enough that you have plenty of budget for other things.

Also, total defense spending has crossed the 1 trillion / year number a while ago so cost wise this is not that unreasonable over the next 40 years. (Including things like nuclear weapons research at the DoE, GAO oversite, pensions, survivor benefits, and healthcare etc.)

The same thing happened in the past to the B-1 and B-2 bomber projects, which cost $200m and $700m per unit respectively. Massive scope creep leads to huge unit cost inflation, followed by a reduction in number of units ordered to keep total cost below the Congressional mandate for the project. The low number of total units ordered leads to an increase in maintenance cost per unit, which eventually leads to shortening the plane's lifespan (too expensive to maintain, each airframe receives double the hours it was intended to endure).

Compare the F22 (at 150m) to the F16 (at 10m). Aside from the stealth capability, this jet is not 10x better than the F16.

The cheapest 'good' 4th-generation fighter is the Saab Gripen, which was designed in a single country to intentionally-limited specs, but even those cost 30 million USD a pop for the standard C & D models and even more for the NG units under development.

To some extent modern fighter aircraft are inherently expensive as a result of all the technology that has to be crammed inside them. They're multi-role networked flying systems these days.

In essence that's part of what has derailed the F-35. Technological advances have allowed for the extensive use of software to create capabilities that just could not have existed before now, such as the ability to see 'through' the plane, an extremely high level of sensor fusion and integrated systems, etc. But massive software projects are inherently risky and can fail massively if not managed very carefully. They've been doing things with software in the F-35 that have never been done before in this context, which only increased the risk.

Also do not underestimate the costs of redesigns following the theft of F-35 design information by China from both Lockheed-Martin and Pentagon computers. I doubt that's the sole cause of the cost overruns, but it definitely hasn't helped.

Linux kernel 2.6.35 13.5 million lines of code

Windows Server 2003 50 MLOC

Mac OS X 10.4 86 MLOC

Debian 5.0 324 MLOC

<EDIT>

And alternatively:

"if you bought a premium-class automobile recently, it probably contains close to 100 million lines of software code":

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/this-car-r...

Whereas the total count for the jet code is (I presume) of highly relevant code all around. It's not like it has 100 video drivers code included, and support for 2000 network cards, or several filesystems.

It appears they have struggling with the complexity of their software implementation. It might just be their requirements but I wonder if it is similar to Ericsson's massive failure with their AXE-N project. No one knows exactly why that software project became too complex but it has been speculated that:

"One particular problem area identified is the system's software , especially for using extreme attention to object orientation (which at the time was the golden hammer ) in both computer programs as databases , [8] which can be difficult to combine with parallel programming, and that they chose to develop and make use of largely new, completely untested methods."

Ericsson attempted to heavily use OOP for the AXE-N, might that be the cause of the failure? The failure spawned the Erlang (functional language, with strict evaluation, single assignment) project which went on to be a massive success in their next product.

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js...

This is not to say the thing isn't an overpriced, failing project. If the GAO's analysis and predictions cited in the article are correct, it sounds pretty bad. In particular, it's hard to imagine that four decades from now, the US armed forces would want to still be using early 21st-century aircraft.

We are fighting against an enemy for which fourth generation fight planes are inadequate and said enemy does not have nuclear armed ICBMs?

Meanwhile the Air Force is bent on taking out of service the one type of aircraft that is most useful to actual, likely war-fighting - the CAS planes. The AC-130 was originally designed in the 60s and troops still cheer when it arrives over the battlefield.

The boys that run the fighter jet mafia consider such "bus driving" planes beneath them, so we instead of upgrading the A, C and perhaps B lines we have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars buying the kind of F line toys they prefer to play with.

Talk about changing requirements during development. Imagine working on a software project that took 20 years to develop.

Add that to the fact that any large military project has to be spread out over as many congressional districts to keep as many congressman happy as possible.

quote:

Unlike previous aircraft, such as the F-22, all software for the F-35 is written in C++ for faster code development. The Integrity DO-178B real-time operating system (RTOS) from Green Hills Software runs on COTS Freescale PowerPC processors.[211] The final Block 3 software for the F-35 is planned to have 8.6 million lines of software code.[212] The scale of the program has led to a software crisis as officials continue to discover that additional software needs to be written.[213] General Norton Schwartz has said that the software is the biggest factor that might delay the USAF's initial operational capability which is now scheduled for April 2016.[214] Michael Gilmore, Director of Operational Test & Evaluation, has written that, "the F-35 mission systems software development and test is tending towards familiar historical patterns of extended development, discovery in flight test, and deferrals to later increments."[215]

Just kidding. Don't stone me.

Old and Arcane it is, but its the most functional...

People have complained other than its complexity the single engine is bad if you are over the Arctic and the engine fails, most modern Canadian jets have dual engines.

I wonder if the F-35 has a particularly reliable engine.

Found this gem on Wikipedia under Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II

Canada had previous experience with a high-accident rate with the single-engine Lockheed CF-104 Starfighter with many accidents related to engine failures. Defence Minister Peter MacKay, when asked what would happen if the F-35’s single engine fails in the Far North, stated "It won’t"

Government contractors do this all the time. They underbid, and then 1 year later, ask the government for more cash because they are soo far in and know the government will do it.

Government contract work is sooo lucrative too. Most of that initial investment into Lockhead probably just went to pay salaries of the higher ups and did no actual work.

Sorry for Ranting.

Am I wrong? If so, help me understand why!!

Also these articles fail to mention the planes that will be retired over the next 40 years that the JSF will replace. Lots of costs savings that arent included.

Military superiority is supported by practical every political base including libertarians. Large, complex aircraft cost a ton to produce. Is there waste? Sure but some of the waste is due to our own democratic political system. Easy to cast all blame on greedy govt contractors.

The total program cost may be a small part of the budget, but our economy would do better if we spent that money on things we can use, not things that sit in a hangar and suck up money.

What 'technology' costed a trillion dollars to develop? Certainly not going to the moon.